“Those I spoke to very much seethemselves as French as anyone else,but are not treated as if they are,” saysBeaman, who has taken interest insimilarities and differences of life forAfrican-descent minorities in France andthe U.S. since studying abroad in Paris asan undergraduate. “Although they aresecond-generation and grew up in Franceas citizens, it’s still not a culture in whichthey are necessarily welcomed.”Beaman has long chronicled thefrustrations of French citizens who feelthey’ve done everything “right”—in termsof support for French Republican ideology,higher education, or upward mobility—toenter the mainstream, but who are still seenas “others.” She has gathered their experiencesin a forthcoming book, tentatively titled

Citizen Outsider. Her work further suggests
that race and ethnic origin are a marker of
difference in French society and that, in terms
of racialized struggle, the distance between
France and Ferguson, Missouri, is smaller
than it may seem.

“These findings are very similar to
what we see in the United States in regard
to Latino Americans or African Americans
in the middle class, in that they tend to be a
much more fragile subset of the middle-class
population,” Beaman says.

Another example of racial marginalization
in France that may resonate with U.S.
minorities, Beaman says, is a disproportionate
rate of “stop-and-frisk” police encounters—
up to five times higher for those of North
African descent in France per a 2012 Human
Rights Watch report.

“There’s a lot of overlap between
Ferguson and France in regard to protests and
demonstrations, such as France’s banlieue

(suburban) riots in 2005, as a sort of call for
being treated as full citizens, not second-class
citizens,” Beaman says.

France’s ethnic strife is rooted in the
country’s long, tumultuous, and bloody
colonial history in Algeria, Tunisia, and
Morocco—now independent nations from
which the parents of Beaman’s subjects
emigrated long ago to find work. The first
generation’s boundary to acceptance could
perhaps be more easily pinned to a lack of
citizenship. The boundaries for their children,
Beaman says, represent a conversation that
French culture has made difficult to carry out
due to France’s lack of reconciliation of its
colonial conflicts.

“I argue that the French are not talking
about the salience of race and ethnic origin as
a marker of difference in a society that prides
itself on the French Republican ideology
of liberté, égalité, et fraternité—in which
everyone is supposed to be viewed the same
way in terms of how they interact with the
state,” Beaman says.

To illustrate her point, Beaman references
her respondents’ ruminations on when France
might have its “Obama moment,” even though
at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy—a second-generation Hungarian immigrant—was
France’s president. Among more recent events,
she cites a relative lack of media mentions for
Ahmed Merabet, an Algerian-origin police
officer killed in the Charlie Hebdo massacre
earlier this year.

“I found it interesting [about Sarkozy]
that because he is white, he’s never ‘othered’
in that same way,” Beaman says. “There is
definitely a distinction between someone of
immigrant origin and someone who is read or
seen as ‘black.’ And [Merabet] was as French
as anyone else, one whose job it was to defend
French ideals, yet he’s rarely mentioned in
news reports of these events. That sort of
hammers home the point of this difference:
How can people who are not white ever truly
and fully fit in when they work for the state
and are still marginalized?”

JEAN BEAMAN

Although it might be one means of
potential change in France, Beaman doesn’t
foresee an equivalent to the U.S. civil rights
movement—due in part to a lack of statistics
on race or ethnicity in France and her
respondent community’s conflicted views on
American identity politics.

“Some feel that tracking any differenceswould only reinforce them culturally, and theyfeel that in theory, if not implementation, theFrench Republican ideology is superior to theU.S. approach to multiculturalism,” Beamansays. “Others appreciate that, while it may be atough conversation, it’s easier to discuss theseissues in the U.S.”“What I think would be interesting toAmericans who may wonder why they shouldcare about France is the question of whether,upon Obama’s election, the U.S. was enteringa post-racial moment,” she adds. “France is aninteresting contrast as a nation that, at leastideologically, purported to achieve this post-racial model from the get-go, and in whichit isn’t working. Among many multiculturalsocieties, there is a universality in play; all ofthem struggle with the issue of how to dealwith ‘difference.’ ”

By Nick Rogers. Photos on page 4 by Jean Beaman. Photo on
page 5 by John Underwood.